To Create Real Change, Leadership Is More Important Than Authority

Aspiring young executives dream of climbing the ladder in order to gain more authority. Then they can make things happen and create the change that they believe in. Senior executives, on the other hand, are often frustrated by how little power they actually have.

The problem is that while authority can compel action it does little to inspire belief. Only leadership can do that. It’s not enough to get people to do what you want, they have to also want what you want or any change is bound to be short lived.

That’s why change management efforts commonly fail. All too often, they are designed to carry out initiatives that come from the top. When you get right down to it, that’s really the just same thing as telling people to do what you want, albeit in slightly more artful way. To make change really happen, it doesn’t need to be managed, but empowered.

Failures of Authority

In the 1850’s, Ignaz Semmelweis was the head physician at the obstetric ward of a small hospital in Pest, Hungary. Having done extensive research into how sanitary conditions could limit infections, he instituted a strict regime of handwashing and virtually eliminated the childbed fever that was endemic at the time.

In 2005, John Antioco was the eminently successful CEO of Blockbuster, the 800-pound gorilla of the video rental industry. Yet, despite the firm’s dominance, he saw a mortal threat coming in the form of streaming video and nimble new competitors like Netflix. He initiated an aggressive program to cancel late fees and invest in an online platform.

Things ended poorly for both men. Semmelweis, was castigated by the medical community and died in an insane asylum, ironically of an infection he contracted while under medical care. Antioco was fired by his company’s board and his successor reversed his reforms. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010.

While today the insights of Semmelweis and Antioco seem obvious, they did not at the time. In the former case, it was believed that illness was caused by an imbalance of humours and in the latter, the threat of online video seemed too distant to justify forsaking profits. Even given their positions of authority, neither was able to overcome the majority view.

Majorities Don’t Just Rule, They Influence

We tend to overestimate the power of influence. It always seems that if we had a little bit more authority or were able to make our case more forcefully, we could drive our ideas forward. Yet Semmelweis and Antioco had not only authority, but also the facts on their side and were willing to risk their careers. They failed nonetheless.

In the 1950’s, the eminent psychologist Solomon Asch performed a series of famous experiments that help explain why. He showed the chart below to a group of people and asked which line on the right matched the line on the left.

It seems like a fairly simple task and it should be, but Asch, renowned for his ingenuity, added a twist. All of the people in the room, except one, were instructed to give wrong answer. By the time he got to the last person who was the true subject, most who participated conformed to the majority view, even though it was obviously wrong.

While we like to think of ourselves as independent and free-thinking, the truth is that we are greatly affected by the views of those around us. If you are in an office where people watch silly cat videos, you’ll find yourself doing the same and laughing along. Yet often you’ll find that they’re not nearly as funny when you watch them in different company.

The truth is that majorities don’t just rule, they also influence, even if the majority is extremely localized and contextual.

How Change Really Happens

Conformity is never absolute. Even in Asch’s experiments, there were some who held out much like Semmelweis and Antioco. We all have our points of conviction on which we are unlikely to be swayed, other areas in which we need more convincing and still others that we really don’t care enough about to form much of an opinion at all.

That, essentially is what the threshold model of collective behavior predicts. Ideas take hold in small local majorities. Many stop there and never go any further, but some saturate those local clusters and move on to more reluctant groups through weak ties. Eventually, a cascading effect ensues.

The best known example of the threshold model at work is the diffusion of innovations model developed by Everett Rogers that is shown above. A small group of innovators gets hold of an idea and indoctrinates a somewhat more reluctant group of early adopters to form local majorities.

Before long, the more reticent denizens of those clusters soon find themselves outnumbered and begin to conform, just as in Asch’s study. The new converts find themselves passing the idea on to other social groups they belong to and the process continues until the idea has grown far beyond its original niche.

When this happens, a cascade can form and even the laggards join in. Those who raised their eyebrows and smirked at the very first cat video are finding themselves showing it to their aunt at a wedding. Intuitively noting that it is already a crowd favorite, she laughs approvingly.

Empowering The Lunatics

We can now see the failure of Semmelweis and Antioco for what it is. Rather than seeking to lead a passionate band of willing innovators and build a movement, they sought the authority to create wholesale change by forcing the undoctrinated against their will. Instead of painstakingly building local majorities, they attempted to compel entire populations.

Control is an illusion and always has been an illusion. It is a Hobbesian paradox that we cannot enforce change unless change has already occurred. The lunatics always run the asylum, the best we can do as leaders is empower them to run it right.

And that’s why change always requires leadership rather than authority. Respectable people always prefer incumbency to disruption. Only misfits are threatened by the status quo. So if you want to create real change, it is not power and influence that you need, but those who seek to overthrow it.